Open Assistant

Open Assistant is a free AI assistant developed by LAION. At first, you might consider this tool similar to Perplexity AI, but it’s more like Claude and ChatGPT since it’s geared towards being a conversational AI instead of just giving answers.

Since this is a project in development, you can be an early participant and help the team collect data for refining the technology. This is pretty exciting because the tasks you can do are generally reserved for IT engineers and other insiders. As a normal user, you often end up getting the final product.

Collaborative fun

Open Assistant makes the collaboration process fun by giving you tasks right after you sign up, which just requires your email address. Each task completed gives you points, and there’s a leaderboard for those with a competitive nature.

The tasks are varied, such as writing a suitable answer, classifying the quality of others’ responses or even allowing the system to assign you a random task. There are usually hundreds available.

Under construction

Unfortunately, all that you can currently do is help train Open Assistant. It’s not yet working as a fully-fledged AI chatbot like others. So don’t expect to ask questions and receive answers yet. 

However, training this AI can be fascinating, and the best part is that you don’t need to be an expert in IT. The website is straightforward; you only need to write into text boxes or classify items with menus.

Be part of the future

If you were hoping to check out yet another AI chatbot, you might want to wait until Open Assistant is released since it’s nowhere near ready yet. In that case, you’re better off with the aforementioned options.

However, this is a great opportunity if you’re curious, looking to get into AI, or even looking for first-hand experience of how these models are built. The tasks are varied enough, and the leaderboard gamifies the tasks so it’s even more fun. If you have some time to spend on helping to create an open-source AI, simply register to get started.